Reflecting on Two Decades of The Enduring Excellence Seminar  for Healthcare Leaders

“Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.” That’s how James Shamiyeh, MD, COO at University of Tennessee Health, described a realization he had at UVA Health during Enduring Excellence, a day-and-a-half experience for healthcare CEOs and other c-suite operations leaders we’ve offered for two decades.

The goal has always been to help them see something a little deeper and perhaps more useful and meaningful to the human beings who lead our institutions than more tactical conference fare.

The seminar exists to expose leaders to the powerful aspirational leadership framework first proven and refined by former Alcoa CEO and US Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill outside of healthcare, and since proven inside healthcare by a few visionary CEOs, CMOs and others who often teach at the conference, from Duke’s Rick Shannon MD to Risant Cone Health’s Mike Bundy.

While offered in many formats over the decades, the jumping off point for the intense hours that up to 15 executives spend together on site at a peer health system has always been O’Neill’s stark assertion that “Organizations are either habitually excellent … or they aren’t.”

If the point of leadership is to help other human beings succeed in doing important things together, and to do them excellently, how do we create an organization that is excellent across the board, by habit, and in a way that will far outlast the tenure of its leaders?

For participants, answering that question starts with simple pre-work, often on the plane as they travel to the seminar. “What do you want to be remembered for, long after your time in the leadership seat is done? What is your greatest asset for getting there? How will you know you are on track?”

This exercise alone helps leaders raise their sights up above their inboxes, the next funding crunch, and perhaps most importantly, the next management fad or product that will “solve” the challenge of the day, to instead focus on strengthening the performance capability of the entire enterprise.

From there, it’s learning in multiple formats:

• Exchanging with leaders inside and outside healthcare who have accomplished astonishing results that have sustained long beyond their tenures
• “Going and seeing” the enterprise operating system and talking with leaders at the host site.
• Learning from each other, over meals, beverages, and lively in session exchanges.
• Turning the gaze inward, taking stock of their own organization’s “current state” vs. the “target state” revealed by the program, and designing the crucial first steps to close the gap.
• The bedrock of integrity and principles which allows everyone to “know what to do” without waiting for a leadership directive.
• That alignment and success amid increasing complexity comes not from more initiatives and yet more data fields, but from the discipline to follow an enterprise operating system which, in the words of Tracey Hoke MD, chief of innovation at UVA Health and the Darden School of Business, “takes account of what went well yesterday but hardwires it, and makes sure yesterday’s problems were solved rigorously, so that they don’t happen again.”

It’s always profound to see the leaders who are struck by how simple, powerful and counter-trend the “formula” for sustained outperformance of an institution is. Including:

“This was the best seminar I’ve ever been to,” said another c-suite exec, “and I’m not even sure a seminar is the right thing to call it.”

It’s an exciting time for these ideas, as the field may be waking up to the fact that tactics and tools and fancy PowerPoints won’t “improve” healthcare operations enough to match the accelerating pace and promise of scientific, clinical and technical progress.

As long as leaders keep being moved by the experience and keep moving their institutions deeper toward being habitually excellent after, we’ll keep coordinating these learning opportunities for the healthcare leaders who aspire to do great things.